ENGL 213 01: Expository Writing II
James, David
TR 1:30 PM 2:20 PM
In this workshop-oriented course, students will make their own choices
of both topics and expository genres. In the process, everyone will focus
on clarity and style to suit chosen audiences and purposes. Revising
with feedback will then lead to a semester’s end portfolio. Full
semester.

ENGL 213 02: Expository Writing II
James, David
TR 2:30 PM 3:20 PM
In this workshop-oriented course, students will make their own choices
of both topics and expository genres. In the process, everyone will focus
on clarity and style to suit chosen audiences and purposes. Revising
with feedback will then lead to a semester’s end portfolio. Full
semester.

ENGL 214 01: Workplace Writing
Aslanian, Janice
MW 11:00 AM 11:50 AM
Communication skills are currently ranked by employers as among the most
desired job-related competency. No matter which career you pursue, this
course will prepare you to respond effectively to various workplace situations.
You will learn to write memos, letters, and digital documents aimed at
a variety of audiences. Additionally, you will construct a resume and
job application letter, and complete a short report. All major writing
assignments will be submitted in a portfolio for a final grade at the
end of the semester.

ENGL 214 02: Workplace Writing
Aslanian, Janice
MW 12:00 PM 12:50 PM
Communication skills are currently ranked by employers as among the most
desired job-related competency. No matter which career you pursue, this
course will prepare you to respond effectively to various workplace situations.
You will learn to write memos, letters, and digital documents aimed at
a variety of audiences. Additionally, you will construct a resume and
job application letter, and complete a short report. All major writing
assignments will be submitted in a portfolio for a final grade at the
end of the semester.

ENGL 232 01: Literature Western World II
Verduin, Kathleen
MWF 9:30 AM 10:20 AM
This is a course in the classics of European literature from approximately
1600 up to (well, almost) the present. Alternating narrative and drama
(and throwing in some representative poems along the way), we will consider
the seventeenth century’s response to a racial reorganization of
Christianity; the Enlightenment’s allegiance to rationality and
satire; the Romantic era’s return to emotion and the fantastic;
Realism’s portrayal of marriage and money; the fascination with
myth and the primitive in the early twentieth century; the Existentialist
writings highly popular at mid-century and in postwar academia; and,
maybe, the rise of the art film as literature’s stepchild. Although
it is of course impossible to do justice to four hundred years of literary
production in a mere four months, we will endeavor to gain some continuity
by tracing Joseph Campbell’s mighty archetype of the Hero’s
Journey.

Texts (available as individual paperbacks) will include Bunyan, Pilgrim’s
Progress; Racine, Phaedra; Voltaire, Candide; Sheridan, The
School for Scandal; Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Goethe, Faust,
Part I; Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych; Ibsen, A
Doll’s House; Hesse,
Demian; works by Sartre and other Existentialists, still to be selected;
and probably a film or two by the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Three
tests, three critical essays, weekly reaction papers. This course substitutes
for IDS 172 and helps meet the second (“modern”) half of
the Cultural Heritage requirement.

A deep pleasure of reading is the sense you’re accompanied by
authors who’ve asked the questions you’re asking: who am
I, why do I feel this way, what is love, who do I want to be, what is
a meaningful life? Together, we’ll ask these questions and more
as we read the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. We’ll analyze
narrative structures in stories and film, listen to poetry, and attend
a play together and talk with the actors. We’ll deepen our understanding
of literature by listening to one another and joining our voices with
other writers. We’ll improve our writing skills with practice and
peer review. All students welcome!

ENGL 248 03: Intro to Literary Studies
Kipp, Julie
TR 9:30 AM 10:50 AM
This course is an introduction to the literary forms of fiction, poetry,
drama, and creative nonfiction, considering elements they have in common
and elements unique to each. It will examine how genres differ, but also
how they intersect and overlap and influence each other. It aims to teach
how to read literature with sensitivity, understanding, and appreciation,
and how to approach that reading from a variety of theoretical perspectives.
It is not a course in writing stories or poems or drama--for that, see
English 254 or 255 or 258. It is a foundational course, intended as preparation
for all higher-numbered literature courses in the English department.
But it also is of value in itself and is recommended for students looking
for an elective dealing with literature broadly. Four credit hours.

ENGL 258 01: Creative Non-Fiction: Portraits and Self-Portraits
Dykstra, Natalie
TR 9:30 AM 10:50 AM
This is a course in creative non-fiction, in particular the writing of
portraits and self-portraits. Some of the best writing in America is
about individuals – biographical portraits or memoir or a wonderful
combination of the two. So that will be our emphasis. We’ll go
to the archives for inspiration for our writing and as well as to our
imaginations and memories. We’ll read a wide range of memoir, profile
and personal essays. Our main focus will be on writing and responding
to one another’s work, with three submissions of 7 – 10 pages
pieces for workshop. Two submissions will be revised for a final portfolio
due on the last day of class. Jack Ridl once said that writing is never
a goal, always a “process. And that process includes feelings and
dead ends and bursts and tangents and doubts and enthusiasms and discoveries
and dreams and all the stuff that fills any day.” Come join us
as we explore the past and the present on paper and with each other.

ENGL 270 01: British Literature I
Schakel, Peter
MWRF 11:00 AM 11:50 AM
Brit Lit I surveys literature written in England until the late eighteenth
century. Its purpose is to give students a general knowledge and understanding
of the great writers and works of early England (Beowulf and other Old
English texts), medieval England (Chaucer, Langland, Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight), Renaissance England (Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare),
writers of the early seventeenth century (Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert)
and the later seventeenth century (Marvell, Milton, Bunyan, Dryden),
and writers of eighteenth century England (Swift, Pope, Johnson, and
Austen). These are the “classic” works and writers that established
the tradition on which later writers built, works and writers that all
students of English literature should be familiar with. Four credit hours.

The literary canon (dead but vital white male poets, such as Blake,
Keats, Tennyson, Eliot, and Auden) will be augmented by wondrous women
warriors (Austen, Shelley, Woolf, Mansfield, and Atwood), Irish giants
(Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney), and fresh Commonwealth voices
(Rhys, Soyinka, Gordimer, Munro, and Rushdie). Most of the readings are
poems and short stories, but a few dramas and essays are also prominent.

Forging links between geographical centers, genders, genres, races,
and critical approaches will be among the impossible dreams of the teacher.
Three tests and/or innovative test alternatives will measure your mastery
of material. Three papers and/or nonpapers (musical, artistic, sculptural,
choreographic, cinematic options) or a longer research project will engage
your scholarly and creative impulses. Journal entries will keep you on
your toes. You will move from "The Songs of Innocence" to the "The
Moment before the Gun Went Off." Four credit hours.

ENGL 280 01: American Literature I
Dykstra, Natalie
W 6:00 PM 8:50 PM
This course surveys American literature from its beginnings to the Civil
War era, an opportunity to search and understand our fascinating past
through the writers, genres, and movements of America’s abundant
literary tradition. We’ll begin with the first English-speaking
settlers and the Native peoples already here; we’ll confront the
crucible of expansion, slavery, and division; and we’ll conclude
with the conflagration of the Civil War and exploration of the American
West. We’ll be asking: what is distinctly American about the literature
we’re reading; how were writers – Rowlandson, Poe, Whitman,
Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville, Douglass, Stowe – shaped
by historical circumstance, gender, race, and class; and how does literature
help create and influence our culture now. Our time in class will be
a mix of lecture and discussion, with a lean towards discussion. There
will be two reading exams, several short papers, class presentations,
and a substantial final research project. It’ll be an adventure – come
join us!

ENGL 281 01: American Literature II
Verduin, Kathleen
MWF 1:00 PM 1:50 PM
America lives in its literature. History shows us events: literature
pictures, responds, incarnates. Rejoices. Sorrows. Brings to life. This
course surveys the American past from the end of the Civil War—and
marches prophetically into the future. We will watch as American writers
(Henry James, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton) define their country in contrast
with Europe; as Civil War veterans (Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Ambrose
Bierce) confront that apocalypse; as African Americans (Booker T. Washington,
W. E. B. Du Bois) struggle to find their place; as Native Americans (Sarah
Winnemucca, Zitkala) unfold their stories; as women (Emily Dickinson,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman) explore the complexities of their condition;
as the West is won, stolen, commandeered (Bret Hart, Jack London). We
will trace the rise of Modernism (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell),
the explosion of new fiction in the 1920s (Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen), the confrontation of darkness in small towns
(Sherwood Anderson) and rural strongholds (Robert Frost), the assertion
of regional difference (Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor),
the establishment of a genuinely American theatre (Eugene O’Neill,
Arthur Miller). We will exult in the carnivalesque variety of American
literature in the last half-century (Tennessee Williams, Bernard Malamud,
the Beats, Joyce Carol Oates)—and soberly reflect on still festering
wounds in the social fabric (James Baldwin, John Updike, Yusef Komunyakaa).
And in the process we’ll get to know ourselves better. A lot better.

Three examinations, four critical papers, one short research project.
Four credit hours.

ENGL 354 01: Intermed Creative Wrtg: Fiction
Childress, Susanna
TR 1:30 PM 3:20 PM
According to Flannery O’Connor, “A story is a way to say
something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every
word in the story to say what the meaning is.” She also said, “I
write to discover what I know.” And also: “You shall know
the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”

So this is your chance! Say something that can’t be said any
other way, and make every word integral in the saying. We’ll closely
examine—as writers who are looking to steal their secrets—short
stories from O’Conner and other literary giants in this genre,
both classic and contemporary. Our course text, Behind the Short Story,
provides not only a wide variety of styles and techniques in short fiction
but also (incredibly insightful) commentary from each author about his/her
story. We’ll undertake exercises to develop your characters, push
your plot lines, and make your dialogue do good and gritty work. We’ll
engage in plenty of in-class critique, also known as “the workshop.” Come
prepared to read and to write—lots and lots of each! You’ll
write several short stories, introduce your classmates to a “new” contemporary
short story writer as well as a literary journal, and turn in a final
portfolio of roughly 30 radically revised pages.

Come discover what
you know. And let the truth set you strange.

ENGL 355 01: Intermed Creative Wrtg: Poems (Poetics
of Hip Hop)
Peschiera, Pablo
MW 1:00 PM 2:50 PM
All poetry is a form of playing with language, and today among the greatest
masters of linguistic play are Hip-Hop artists, especially rappers. This
course will look at specific strategies and forms used in poetry while
reading the best lyrics by the best Hip-Hop artists & writers today.

All poets play with form (I'm not talking just sonnets, villanelles,
and sestinas, though they count, too). Today's poets work the razor's
edge of form and technique: they look to the forms and techniques of
the past and use them for a poet's purpose: to create art that speaks
in today's vernacular. You'll get prompts and guidance along the way,
and you'll see poetry as a living art in which a poet both resettles
known territory and blazes new paths across unknown land.

In English 355 you'll practice poetic techniques and forms while you
develop a more profound self-awareness of your innate language habits.
You'll write about one dozen wonderful new poems, and make of them a
chapbook while both new and experienced poets provide feedback on your
work. You'll learn new strategies for getting more out of reading poetry
and listening to Hip Hop (top among them: READ LOTS OF POETRY—LISTEN
TO LOTS OF RAP), and you'll come to know fascinating poets and rappers
who love what they do because they know it matters.

ENGL 360 01: Modern English Grammar
Verduin, Kathleen
MWF 12:00-12:50
Grounded in the State of Michigan’s standards for English teachers,
this course will enable you to teach writing on the elementary and secondary
levels—and, let’s hope, make you a better, more confident
writer yourself. We will start by identifying common errors—those
small but irritating mistakes that can make you look ignorant—and
then progress to an understanding of the parts of speech, the basic forms
of words, the principles of correct and sophisticated sentence structure,
and the art (yes, art!) of skillful punctuation. A good deal of our activity,
though, will focus on the diagramming of sentences: a daunting prospect
for the novice, but eventually such a joy that it’s been called
more fun than Sudoku! You will soon be batting around terms like “noun
clause,” “adjectival,” “phrasal verb,” and “morpheme” as
if you had known them all your life. And you will also gain a sense of
how grammar—a word which means many things to many people—has
become a thorny social and even political issue.
Four tests; numerous exercises; production of one error-free academic
paper.

ENGL 371 02: Beatnik Generation
Hemenway, Stephen
MWF 1:00 PM 1:50 PM
Are you ready to “Howl”? This thrice-in-a-lifetime (mine,
at least) course on “The Beat Generation” explores the “beaten
down,” “beat up,” and “beatific” aspects
of many nonconformist, rootless, drugged, and searching American writers
of the 1950s and 1960s. Secular and sacred aspects of the Beatnik movement
receive critical attention and a fresh look at what makes the works durable
or degrading more than half a century later.

Harvey Pekar’s recently released The Beats, a graphic history
with works by eleven artists, serves as an excellent introduction. Classic
and controversial memoirs, novels, and plays nestle next to each other:
On the Road and The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, One
Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest by Ken Kesey, How I Became Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones, and Dutchman by Amiri Baraka. Poems by Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, and Kenneth
Rexroth sidle up to nonfiction and essays by William Burroughs, Carolyn
Cassady, Ann Charters, Edie Parker Kerouac, and Norman Mailer.

The course briefly examines early influences on the Beat writers from
British Romantics (Blake and Shelley), American Romantics (Thoreau and
Whitman) and American Modernists (Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams).
Musical connections (John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan, John
Cage, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead) get well-deserved attention,
and campy old films about Beatniks (High School
Confidential, The Subterraneans,
The Cool and the Crazy) show cinema at its worst. Very recent films (Howl with James Franco, Kill
Your Darlings with Daniel Radcliffe, Big Sur with Anthony Edwards) reveal the continued popularity of this era. Beat celebrators (e.g., Anne Waldman in The
Beat Book) and Beat debunkers
(e.g., Norman Podhoretz in “The Know-Nothing Bohemians”)
get equal coverage. The squeamish need not apply; some material is R-rated.
Four credit hours.

ENGL 373 02: Shakespeare's Plays
Cox, John
MW 3:00 PM 4:20 PM
The textbook for this course organizes Shakespeare's plays into four
kinds, or "genres": comedy, history, tragedy, and romance.
The first "complete works" edition (the so-called First Folio,
published in 1623) uses a similar organizing strategy, but it omits "romance" and
often puts plays in very different categories from those a modern editor
would select for them. Who is right, in a case like this, and why? How
much did Shakespeare himself think in terms of genre, as he wrote his
plays? Does genre have a fixed identity, or is it a cultural construct?
This course will approach Shakespeare's plays by raising questions about
the identity of dramatic form, trying to understand, as best we can,
how the plays came to have the shape they do. An important question is
whether film constitutes a new genre. Is Branagh's Hamlet a different
kind of work from a stage production of the play? To help answer this
question, the course will strongly emphasize filmed versions of the plays,
using the extensive DVD and videotape collection in the VanWylen Library.
Four credit hours.

Top Reasons to Study the History of the English Language
1. Gain philological tools for better understanding and analysis of literature
in English from any period and any culture, from the Old English of Beowulf
to the Spanglish of Gloria Anzaldúa.
2. Get an overview of the entire English literary tradition in its linguistic
and historical context.
3. Understand how English has changed over time and varies according
to culture, nationality, class, and medium—and consider the social
and political significance of these varieties.
4. Learn how English came to have at least three times more words than
any other language and became the most widely used language in the world.
5. See how the Oxford Inklings, including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S.
Lewis, made important contributions to the study of the English language
and how their studies inspired their own fiction and poetry.
6. Think about how Standard English relates to other varieties. What
is good English and who decides?
7. Imagine what the future of English is likely to be. How, for instance,
are politics and technology changing the language?

You’ll learn
just enough about Old English poetry to translate a passage from Beowulf
if you had to and, more important, to analyze
and evaluate the choices made by a published translation. Other short
projects will focus on Middle and Early Modern English through the work
of Chaucer and Shakespeare, help you learn how to study individual words
and their histories, and take a critical look at language authorities
like dictionaries. You will also write a research-based paper and give
a class presentation, each on topics of your choice. All in all, this
course cultivates literary, linguistic, and historical attention to English
that will enrich your reading, make you sensitive in new ways to language
in any medium, and improve your use of English in any kind of writing.

ENGL 375 02: Ethnic American Young Adult Literature
Montano, Jesus
MW 3:00 PM 4:20 PMIn this course we will analyze Ethnic American literature for young adults.
The goal of this course will be to explore a wide range of texts, ranging
from a young girl growing up in Chicago, to a young boy growing up in
the Coeur d’Alene Reservation, or in the innards of Flint, as well
as travel narratives taking us to the depths of war and destruction.

This course will be taught with a major emphasis on critical issues
surrounding the renaissance of multicultural literature. Due to the novel
nature of this approach, time and emphasis will be given to questions
of intercultural production, intertextuality, historicism, and diversity
in America. By exploring literature for young adults in this manner,
we hope to raise fundamental questions over the very essence of our world
and how we see it.

This course will require extensive reading and discussion, a variety
of written responses through a variety of critical perspectives, multimedia
presentations, and a more extensive final project. This course meets
Hope College cultural diversity requirements.

ENGL 375 03: Contemporary Black Women Novelists
Parker, Kendra
TR 9:30 AM 10:50 AM
How do “healing,” “salvation,” and/or self-discovery
change in the context of black women’s writing? This course considers
one way to approach contemporary African American women’s writing
through modes of healing, salvation, and/or self discovery. The novels
we read will be those published after 1990 and up to the present moment.
The notion of “healing” is indispensable in understanding
how black women’s identities are formed and marshaled, particularly
as the question of just what constitutes a body worth healing, saving,
or writing about and its meanings are profoundly raised.

ENGL 380 01: Teaching Secondary School English
Moreau, Bill
M 4:00 PM 5:50 PM
ENGL 381 01 Field Placement TBD
Are you an English major who wants to be an English teacher in a secondary
school? Are you an English minor who may end up teaching some English
as part of your future career choice? If either of these situations fits
you, this class is designed to help. We'll learn concrete, practical
methods for choosing and teaching literature, for teaching and evaluating
the process of writing, and for presenting the study of grammar and usage.
Topics of interest related to the profession of classroom teaching as
a whole will also be shared. Class sessions will include informal lectures,
student projects and presentations, and discussions. Reading will be
from texts to be named later, and a mountain of handouts. Three credits
total—two for the class, one for a field experience TBA.

Literary translation
is a deeply important art form in its own right. So much wonderful and
influential literature wasn’t originally
written in English! Most of us have heard of the Russians Dostoevsky
and Tolstoy; the Spaniards Cervantes and Colombian Garcia-Marquez; the
French Flaubert and Sands; the Germans Hesse and Celan, the great Italian
Dante; the Romans Virgil and Horace, and the Greeks Homer and Sappho;
and so many others. If you only know English, you know these writers
ony through their translations.

Often the difference between accessing
the genius of Paul Celan’s
poems and not “getting it” is the difference between a skillful
translation. Translations are written for many different purposes—sometimes
to evoke the rhythmic beauty of the original, other times to capture
the exactness of the original’s images. Reading different translations
of a work of literature gives us multiple ways to experience his poems—and
to understand how we all read the same, but differently.

Translation is
fundamentally an act of balancing “literary” or “poetic” language
with “literalness”—with how closely you communicate
the words/ideas of the original poem in your new version. About half
of the course will be spent in discussing and comparing our own translations.

We’ll also spend perhaps a third of the course looking at essays
on the history and theory behind translation. Translation as an idea
has provoked many different—and sometimes opposed—ideas about
what makes for good translation practice. As you develop your own skills
as a translator, you’ll formulate your own theories on how to do
it.

Like with writing, there’s no one foolproof way to learn the
art of translation, but there are best practices. While delving into
the
history (and some of the theory) of translation, we will attempt translations
of various works from various languages, using the best practices as
passed-on by great translators. We will read both great and less-great
translations, and try to see why some work better than others. We will
look at how translation has been done and why, and create our own motivations
for translating.

Many literary translations are produced through collaboration
between a writer (of the language into which the work is being translated)
and
someone who speaks both languages. Other literary translations are produced
by those who speak and read the source text fluently. In translation
much of the art is in the destination language—for us that will
be English. A mediocre writer who speaks both languages is often not
as effective a translator as a wonderful writer working in collaboration
with a native speaker.

Keeping all this in mind, in this course we will
not assume that you have any mastery of a language other than English
(though knowledge of
other languages will be very helpful), and much of the class will run
very much like any other writing workshop. You’ll be given “trots” (or
literal, word-for-word translations), and whenever possible, an expert
in the language from which you’ll be translating will come in to
answer questions about the language, etc. We’ll then workshop the
versions of the poems you’ve developed form the trots much as we
do your own writing (though we’ll generally spend a bit less time
on each piece, since the question of “vision” is never on
the table for discussion). We’ll be focusing on your language,
syntax, line breaks, and all the other formal aspects of a piece of literature.

Prerequisites:
two semesters of a language other than English (or equivalent), and English
113—ask instructor for more details

ENGL 480 01: Intro to Literary TheoryGruenler, Curtis
TR 9:30 AM 10:50 AM
Literary theory has become part of what those pursuing literary studies
are assumed to know. What does theory contribute to the discipline? How
does it connect literary studies to other disciplines like philosophy,
history, theology, and psychology? What are the principles behind the
different “schools” of literary theory? What are their possibilities
and limitations for reading texts? This course will inform and enrich
your judgment about why literature is valuable and what kind of reading
is important. I hope it will help you not only understand literary texts
better, but enjoy them more. You may come out reading everything as a
text, since that is what literary theorists tend to do.

We will begin by considering basic questions and points of view about
literature as articulated by classic thinkers from Aristotle to Eliot.
Most of the course will be a tour of the major schools of thought from
the past century, such as formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism,
reader-response theory, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism,
gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, postcolonial criticism,
and ecocriticism. As we move through these schools, we'll consider the
writings of major theorists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes,
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricouer, Jacques
Lacan, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Stephen Greenblatt,
Wendell Berry, and Gloria Anzaldúa. We will give particular attention
to René Girard’s mimetic theory of culture as both a literary
theory and a theory of theory.

The course will be conducted as a discussion-based seminar. Requirements
will include several short papers and a long final paper that apply theoretical
approaches to the texts of your choice. One side benefit of the course
is getting to write and talk critically about whatever texts (stories,
poems, plays, films, games, etc.) you are interested in.

ENGL 495 01: Advanced Studies in EnglishChildress, Susanna
W 3:00 PM 5:50 PM
Malian musician Ali Farka Touré says that honey is never good
when it’s only in one mouth. Let this be your invitation to share
in the bright raw sweetness that is writing and reading in a group of
talented and invested peers. Our multi-genre capstone course in creative
writing will feature poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art-writing collaborations
like the graphic novel. In what we read as well as what we write, we’ll
examine how genres blur and boundaries shimmy. We’ll also work
backwards and forwards, technologically speaking; students will create
a material art-piece, such as a broadside or a hand-bound booklet, as
well as web-based new media, such as a poetry video or, for prose, a
story/essay trailor. Mostly, we’ll be doing a sizeable amount of
reading, with required weekly responses, leading discussions, and presentations.
Students should be prepared to generate substantial new writing, committing
to accountability and community in class as well as in small groups outside
of class. The final project for each student will be determined individually,
will consist of two or more genres, and will provide evidence of the
pursuit of publication. Along the way we’ll discuss what it means
to be a writer (post-college) and explore resources for writing at every
stage of life. Let the goodness begin: honey for one, honey for all.